The daddy of sweet 50s teenager Carol (June Kenney, who might even still be somewhat young) disappears when he should be returning home to his family. Her jerky teenage boyfriend Mike (Eugene Persson, age 24 and looking older) thinks the man has just gone on one of his drinking binges, but Carol knows better.
After more jerkiness I began to hope Mike would be eaten by a giant spider soon, instead he caves in, borrows the car of his teenage friend Joe (Troy Patterson, with a birth year of 1923 the oldest teenager I have ever seen) and goes on the search for Daddy with Carol. They soon find his wrecked car and calculate he must have gone into a nearby cave. A cave with a real bad reputation - people enter, but they never leave. Nonetheless, the two waddle into the cave, and enter a world of very special effects gone even more wrong than one expects. Somehow someone involved in the production (and I'm looking at Bert I. Gordon) thought it prudent to enhance a mediocre cave set with something that looks very much as if said someone had scribbled a few cave-like lines onto the screen. From time to time we also see a few shots of the good old Carlsbad Caverns - of course without any actors in them. Our intrepid heroes stumble through this weird place and find some typical cave stuff (skeletons, the desiccated corpse of Carol's father) and a net right out of a gymnasium, um, I mean a giant spider net.
While they are climbing about on the net (and really, who wouldn't?) a giant tarantula - played by a normal tarantula badly, really badly superimposed - attacks them. No, it's never explained where the giant spider learned to make nets, but the poor thing isn't using them in the rest of the film anyway.
They get away and run straight to their science teacher Mr. Kingman (Ed Kemmer), who is something of a two-fisted scientist, and so not predisposed to completely believe their story, but at least interested enough in their story to phone the sheriff (Gene Roff) - whom I very soon christened Cletus - and urge the man to help him and a few others search the cave. Kingman also convinces Cletus to get as much DDT as possible. Just in case.
I don't know how, but the sheriff manages to acquire a whole truckload of the stuff. It certainly comes in handy when they encounter the spider (and also as a way to prevent the characters from procreating - a very good thing for our gene pool).
A short cancerous and kind of boring fight later the spider is dead and the sheriff bound to blast the cave entrance shut. Kingman has different plans, though - he wants to study the reason for the animal's abnormal size. So he uses his savings(!) to pay for the transport of the corpse into his school's gymnasium(!!), in the hope of selling the corpse to a university, it seems.
The thing he didn't account for is the power of Rock'n'Roll. The local student band (led by none other than our old friend Joe, who is their lead dancer and conductor) sneaks into the gym to practice for a coming dance, awakening with their sounds of joyous abandon the not quite dead spider. A very mild form of rampage ensues - it's not easy to go on a rampage when you're a special effect that can't interact with anything.
Fortunately, our heroic science teacher and the dopey sheriff are there to save the day with the help of much talking and the power of electricity.
I usually love giant monster movies, be they bad, good or in between, but Earth vs. the Spider (which should have been called One American Small Town vs. the Spider) doesn't make it easy. It may have a very bad reputation, yet it really isn't all that bad. Sure, the acting is atrocious, the effects laughable and the script vapid as can be, but there are still many films that are much worse than it.
On the other hand, one would be hard pressed to call it good, especially when one adds to its list of flaws the simple facts that it's kind of slow, and kind of boring, and doesn't even include a real monster rampage. So Earth vs. the Spider sits there in a place of total mediocrity, neither good nor bad enough to be of real interest - the most terrible destiny a film can suffer.
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2 comments:
Just once, can't the spider win?
I hope for that in the imaginary sequel, The Spider: The Comeback.
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